You understand that this is China, right, and that these women don't get to vote for their government? And to be fair, I doubt that anyone discussing this wouldn't rather do something about the Chinese government, but since they have a lot of nuclear weapons, that's a challenge.
Well, why don't they just get together in, say, Tiananmen Square and protest? Or dump some Tea into Shanghai harbor?
I'm whining about the symptom because it is an addressable, voluntarily participating part of the disease.
Meh. Just using this as a hobbyhorse against naughty capitalists. Letting the commies off the hook. I'd rather see the pain get so unbearable that the disease finally gets addressed because there's no other way.
While child prostitution is a real danger to many young girls in South and South East Asia, to present that as the only other employment alternative there is mindbogglingly condescending to the thousands of fine, upstanding folk in that country. You should be ashamed to have made such a statement.
Well then, if there are all those other opportunities out there, why aren't we hearing more about them? If the folk were so fine and upstanding, why would they let sex slavery happen to their children?
I think that unfree governments that push their citizens into poverty through bad governance and lack of liberty should be ashamed, as well as those cultural relativists who stay silent about them (or even approve of them).
Glad to see it. Besides the obvious welfare-for-smart-people angle, it will bolster the credibility of American deterrence. There's still China out there, and they might think they could win a nuclear war over Taiwan someday. Not to mention a Russia that could become resurgent and continue down the path of despotism.
The genie cannot be confined back in its bottle, therefore if there's going to be nukes, America should have the most and the best.
So you won't mind then if we put your kids to work in a sweatshop, with no visitors, no income assistance, NOTHING. And we'll see if they can work their way out of it. Guess what? They wouldn't be able to.
Who's "we" there, jonnycakes? Your jackbooted socialist government thugs come to strip my rights away and steal my child? My Glock would scoff, if I were fortunate enough to live in a shall-carry state.
And frankly, if I had no other choices than to see my child starve, whore her out to European sex tourists, or have her work in conditions that my great-grandfather may have worked, then I'd choose the lattest. But then again, I have an education and I live in a democracy that has chosen to prohibit certain child labor practices (at a cost that the electorate has decided was worth paying), so my choices aren't so stark.
Frankly, if you're so hot on 'labor justice', how about protesting the actual disease of bad governance on the part of the state rather than the symptom which is private enterprise taking advantage of the state? Talk about a fucking hypocrite!
The point is that Apple and every other company making millions in profit off of these sweatshops could afford to make a few million less and have better working conditions in the factories. By that I mean doing periodic inspections to make sure the workers have 12 hour shifts, not 16. Make sure the working conditions aren't as dangerous as they were in the USA around 1900.
Again and again and again, how is this Apple's responsibility? How is it not the government's responsibility? Why are you bleating about the symptom instead of calling for the cure of the actual underlying disease, which is the lack of liberty and representative government in these countries?
And your solution would be to push these folks back to the countryside to farm? Worked _great_ for Pol Pot there, comrade...
How is this Apple's responsibility? Why hate them instead of the government which allows it to happen? Why don't these women vote that government out of office and replace it with one that has a more sensitive view of worker rights?
Again, why are you whining about the symptom rather than the disease?
The sweatshops are installed to ensure those who work there never leave poverty. If they begin to scale upwards the social ladder you won't have anyone who is willing to work for such low-wages. This is why sweatshop owners crush any attempts by their workers to unionize.
Then the workers can quit.
Oh wait, there's too many people, so labor is worth less, so wages go down? Is that Malthus chuckling?
Why is that the way out for developing nations when every industrial and post-industrial power in the world put an end to child labor and sub-subsistience wages through government regulations?
Because they voted to do so? Probably because they were rich enough that they didn't need to have children in the economy, and had enough people to satisfy the labor requirements affordably within 40 hrs a week?
If the people don't like it, they can vote to change it. Oh wait, they're not democracies? Well then, they can revolt and form democracies, then change it. Or they can wimp out and sneak into the USA. Meh.
Damn right. There's an enormous amount of hypocrisy when people get outraged about these issues that they read about over the internet (via routers, and cables that were made with slave labor), sitting on a chair (that was made by slave labor), sipping their coffee made from beans (harvested by slave labor) in a plastic mug (you get the idea).
It's not slave labor if you can quit. Or if you're a robot.
Change has to happen somewhere, and some companies, believe it or not, will be held to higher standards. No one would give to winks if they found out Microsoft was doing the same thing with their XBoxes, but when you have a company like Apple, who prides themselves of being a very progressive, different, and generally feel-good company.. you just can't let it slide by.
So Steve Jobs "does the right thing", Apple margins shrink, they have less $$$ left for R&D, the pipeline starts to dry up, the investors revolt, and he gets shitcanned for another Sculley or *shudder* Spindler.
Fuck that shit.
If folks don't like the wages they get, they can quit. Simple as dat. After a few weeks spent eating tree bark and groundnuts, maybe they'll come back a bit humbler and ready to work.
I just bought a pair of New Balance shoes, and I only buy NB athletic shoes because they still make some in the USA (check the inside label, because they also make some models abroad).
I do too, but mostly because they're not total ripoffs and they come in size 15. However, I don't think I'd pay a premium for them relative to other shoes with equivalent satisfaction ratings and build quality.
I'm also a bit of a woodworker/tool junkie, and I refuse to buy tools made in China. I'll settle for Japan, Europe or Mexico if USA isn't available. But nothing from Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, etc.
Congratulations, there's a young girl in Thailand that's being sold into sex slavery because she or her parents can't get a job at the local tool plant. BTW, that computer you just typed your post on? Lots of it came from China, Malaysia, etc. Hypocrisy? You're soaking in it!!
The only people to blame are consumers. Demand something else and you'll get it. Settle, and you get sweatshop labor. "Free Tibet" isn't just a bumper sticker slogan. If you really cared about it, you would change your ways.
Sweatshops are better than fuckshops. Or starvation. Frankly, I consider it a moral imperative to buy products made in developing countries. The fact that it fucks over unionized labor is just sweet, sweet icing on that cake.
BTW, you think that SUV of yours is American-made? HARDLY.. More like Hecho en Mexico... Try a Toyota if you want American made (and to thumb your nose at greedy unions)...
Actually, given the natural ingenuity and education of China (and its population size), I'm more of the mind that a free, unleashed China could be the worst sort of competition to the USA. Imagine the former Warsaw Pact vs. the former NATO, where the Baltics, Poland, and eastern Europe in general are leapfrogging tax-burdened and aging western Europe. A liberated China with a modern democratic system could leapfrog the US.
Which is why, cynically, the best option for American interests may be a continuation of the status quo, where the fruit of Chinese labor is kept nice and cheap, and the pigs walk on two legs and wear human clothes.
My God. I can't recall the last time that so many people lined up to actively support sweatshops and exploitation. What does this tell us about Apple fans?
It tells us that we understand market economics?
It's a simple equation. In a global economy we can try to raise everyone's wages and standards of living, or we can choose to lower everyone's wages and standards of living.
Uhhh, no. We don't choose any of that, there's no choices, it's all determined by a chaotic market system where many variables (such as education, population, demand, automation, etc) are in play. The last time some people tried to impose order on that chaos, it ended quite badly, though some folks haven't learned. Embrace the goddess, learn to live with and love chaos.
The Chinese worker being paid $50 a month is dragging your income down. Decently paid unionized workers in Europe or North America drag the wages paid to Chinse workers up
Uhhh, no. The fact that there are so many folks qualified to do that work globally drags the value of that level of labor down to that level. Because that is what the labor is worth: what employers have to pay for it. What will drag Chinese wages up? Local demand for those products. And when wages get too high? Robots. Get those wooden shoes ready!!
Look at it this way. If you work in North America your real income is probably in decline. What happens if in five or ten years the cheap Chinese labor pool unionizes and strikes for higher wages?
Then the ChiComs will crack down and imprison the leaders (or kill them) since the Communist Party will not brook any form of political organization that it doesn't wholly own and operate. And if they want more money than the work is worth, I'm sure some Cambodians will take up the slack, which'd be better than sex slavery at any rate. Better fucked in the wallet than in the 12-year-old vagina by sweaty German tourists, don't you think?
Granted, given China's history and politics, that wouldn't be too hard to imagine.
But there's nothing that I've read that suggests that Apple (or any other western employer) can coerce the government at any level into indenturing Chinese citizens to their foreign 'masters'. Considering their history, one would find that possibility quite unlikely.
Methinks everyone in the US could use a mandatory 2-year refresher in world history. As long as it isn't taught exclusively by Zinn and his fellow-travelling comrades.
If you don't like the wages, don't work for the company. Enough people not working for the company, they have to raise wages. That's how it works. Your labor is worth what someone will pay you for it, or what you can create and sell with it. TANSTAAFL.
And if Apple (or some other corp) weren't there, what would they do? Farm?? Like you can make any money doing that with western subsidies glutting agriculture markets.
... howsabout getting devices of the _current_ generation to work properly? So folks can, I don't know, use video switching receivers and not have to worry about HDMI version compatibility?
Then again, "This one works, really, we mean it this time!" as an ad slogan only seems to work for Microsoft...
If you still have the art files for Transport Tycoon, check out openttd.org. Very fun, with rules expansions, patches, bugfixes, and (yes) cheats.
Many people think it's more fun than Sawyer's own followup Locomotion. And you can't beat the price or the platform availability (Win32, Linux, OS X, MorphOS)..
Sorry folks, but that is the definition of a police state. The fact that it doesn't happen as often as it does in other police states doesn't change a damn thing.
Even without going full-electric (and even if it solved the 'refueling' problem, it'd need to be able to go at least 350mi between charges to be useful to single-car households) I'd think a fully-capacitorized battery system would make regenerative braking much more efficient, since current hybrid designs can't get full regenerative efficiency because of how much juice you can shove back into the batteries in the given time.. If these capacitors could keep up with a full-stomp brake from 60mph that would be a huge improvement.. It'd lengthen the life of pads and rotors too..
So maybe the rust belt should be fighting for these developments, but they can't overcome 1 issue - companies want to be close to their datacenter. It goes against the security mission, the cost justification, and just about everything else; but these always get built right next to corporate HQ or in some metropolitan area. Doh!
Nope, the rust belt is fscked because of legacy tax and political structures geared around dying heavy industries. If MI had the same tax, political and work structures as, say, Nevada, they might be able to do it.
The best location for colocation? Hmm.. Cross-reference power costs, distance to backbone peering, and corporate friendliness rankings... Maybe Wyoming, Tennessee, South Dakota?
Slashdot Mirror
For example, Mars is undergoing global warming as measured by its melting ice caps.
Halliburton Strikes Again!!!!
The earth is warming at exactly the same time and humans are certainly not responsible for warming on mars.
NEVER underestimate the cunning of Chimpy McBushitlerburton and his devious cronies.... Bush Lied, Martians Fried!!!!
You understand that this is China, right, and that these women don't get to vote for their government? And to be fair, I doubt that anyone discussing this wouldn't rather do something about the Chinese government, but since they have a lot of nuclear weapons, that's a challenge.
Well, why don't they just get together in, say, Tiananmen Square and protest? Or dump some Tea into Shanghai harbor?
I'm whining about the symptom because it is an addressable, voluntarily participating part of the disease.
Meh. Just using this as a hobbyhorse against naughty capitalists. Letting the commies off the hook. I'd rather see the pain get so unbearable that the disease finally gets addressed because there's no other way.
While child prostitution is a real danger to many young girls in South and South East Asia, to present that as the only other employment alternative there is mindbogglingly condescending to the thousands of fine, upstanding folk in that country. You should be ashamed to have made such a statement.
Well then, if there are all those other opportunities out there, why aren't we hearing more about them? If the folk were so fine and upstanding, why would they let sex slavery happen to their children?
I think that unfree governments that push their citizens into poverty through bad governance and lack of liberty should be ashamed, as well as those cultural relativists who stay silent about them (or even approve of them).
Cliff Hanger is probably what you mean. And yeah, I wish I could find it :p
Glad to see it. Besides the obvious welfare-for-smart-people angle, it will bolster the credibility of American deterrence. There's still China out there, and they might think they could win a nuclear war over Taiwan someday. Not to mention a Russia that could become resurgent and continue down the path of despotism.
The genie cannot be confined back in its bottle, therefore if there's going to be nukes, America should have the most and the best.
So you won't mind then if we put your kids to work in a sweatshop, with no visitors, no income assistance, NOTHING. And we'll see if they can work their way out of it. Guess what? They wouldn't be able to.
Who's "we" there, jonnycakes? Your jackbooted socialist government thugs come to strip my rights away and steal my child? My Glock would scoff, if I were fortunate enough to live in a shall-carry state.
And frankly, if I had no other choices than to see my child starve, whore her out to European sex tourists, or have her work in conditions that my great-grandfather may have worked, then I'd choose the lattest. But then again, I have an education and I live in a democracy that has chosen to prohibit certain child labor practices (at a cost that the electorate has decided was worth paying), so my choices aren't so stark.
Frankly, if you're so hot on 'labor justice', how about protesting the actual disease of bad governance on the part of the state rather than the symptom which is private enterprise taking advantage of the state? Talk about a fucking hypocrite!
The point is that Apple and every other company making millions in profit off of these sweatshops could afford to make a few million less and have better working conditions in the factories. By that I mean doing periodic inspections to make sure the workers have 12 hour shifts, not 16. Make sure the working conditions aren't as dangerous as they were in the USA around 1900.
Again and again and again, how is this Apple's responsibility? How is it not the government's responsibility? Why are you bleating about the symptom instead of calling for the cure of the actual underlying disease, which is the lack of liberty and representative government in these countries?
And your solution would be to push these folks back to the countryside to farm? Worked _great_ for Pol Pot there, comrade...
How is this Apple's responsibility? Why hate them instead of the government which allows it to happen? Why don't these women vote that government out of office and replace it with one that has a more sensitive view of worker rights?
Again, why are you whining about the symptom rather than the disease?
The sweatshops are installed to ensure those who work there never leave poverty. If they begin to scale upwards the social ladder you won't have anyone who is willing to work for such low-wages. This is why sweatshop owners crush any attempts by their workers to unionize.
Then the workers can quit.
Oh wait, there's too many people, so labor is worth less, so wages go down? Is that Malthus chuckling?
Why is that the way out for developing nations when every industrial and post-industrial power in the world put an end to child labor and sub-subsistience wages through government regulations?
Because they voted to do so? Probably because they were rich enough that they didn't need to have children in the economy, and had enough people to satisfy the labor requirements affordably within 40 hrs a week?
If the people don't like it, they can vote to change it. Oh wait, they're not democracies? Well then, they can revolt and form democracies, then change it. Or they can wimp out and sneak into the USA. Meh.
Damn right. There's an enormous amount of hypocrisy when people get outraged about these issues that they read about over the internet (via routers, and cables that were made with slave labor), sitting on a chair (that was made by slave labor), sipping their coffee made from beans (harvested by slave labor) in a plastic mug (you get the idea).
It's not slave labor if you can quit. Or if you're a robot.
Change has to happen somewhere, and some companies, believe it or not, will be held to higher standards. No one would give to winks if they found out Microsoft was doing the same thing with their XBoxes, but when you have a company like Apple, who prides themselves of being a very progressive, different, and generally feel-good company .. you just can't let it slide by.
So Steve Jobs "does the right thing", Apple margins shrink, they have less $$$ left for R&D, the pipeline starts to dry up, the investors revolt, and he gets shitcanned for another Sculley or *shudder* Spindler.
Fuck that shit.
If folks don't like the wages they get, they can quit. Simple as dat. After a few weeks spent eating tree bark and groundnuts, maybe they'll come back a bit humbler and ready to work.
I just bought a pair of New Balance shoes, and I only buy NB athletic shoes because they still make some in the USA (check the inside label, because they also make some models abroad).
I do too, but mostly because they're not total ripoffs and they come in size 15. However, I don't think I'd pay a premium for them relative to other shoes with equivalent satisfaction ratings and build quality.
I'm also a bit of a woodworker/tool junkie, and I refuse to buy tools made in China. I'll settle for Japan, Europe or Mexico if USA isn't available. But nothing from Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, etc.
Congratulations, there's a young girl in Thailand that's being sold into sex slavery because she or her parents can't get a job at the local tool plant. BTW, that computer you just typed your post on? Lots of it came from China, Malaysia, etc. Hypocrisy? You're soaking in it!!
The only people to blame are consumers. Demand something else and you'll get it. Settle, and you get sweatshop labor. "Free Tibet" isn't just a bumper sticker slogan. If you really cared about it, you would change your ways.
Sweatshops are better than fuckshops. Or starvation. Frankly, I consider it a moral imperative to buy products made in developing countries. The fact that it fucks over unionized labor is just sweet, sweet icing on that cake.
BTW, you think that SUV of yours is American-made? HARDLY.. More like Hecho en Mexico... Try a Toyota if you want American made (and to thumb your nose at greedy unions)...
Actually, given the natural ingenuity and education of China (and its population size), I'm more of the mind that a free, unleashed China could be the worst sort of competition to the USA. Imagine the former Warsaw Pact vs. the former NATO, where the Baltics, Poland, and eastern Europe in general are leapfrogging tax-burdened and aging western Europe. A liberated China with a modern democratic system could leapfrog the US.
Which is why, cynically, the best option for American interests may be a continuation of the status quo, where the fruit of Chinese labor is kept nice and cheap, and the pigs walk on two legs and wear human clothes.
My God. I can't recall the last time that so many people lined up to actively support sweatshops and exploitation. What does this tell us about Apple fans?
It tells us that we understand market economics?
It's a simple equation. In a global economy we can try to raise everyone's wages and standards of living, or we can choose to lower everyone's wages and standards of living.
Uhhh, no. We don't choose any of that, there's no choices, it's all determined by a chaotic market system where many variables (such as education, population, demand, automation, etc) are in play. The last time some people tried to impose order on that chaos, it ended quite badly, though some folks haven't learned. Embrace the goddess, learn to live with and love chaos.
The Chinese worker being paid $50 a month is dragging your income down. Decently paid unionized workers in Europe or North America drag the wages paid to Chinse workers up
Uhhh, no. The fact that there are so many folks qualified to do that work globally drags the value of that level of labor down to that level. Because that is what the labor is worth: what employers have to pay for it. What will drag Chinese wages up? Local demand for those products. And when wages get too high? Robots. Get those wooden shoes ready!!
Look at it this way. If you work in North America your real income is probably in decline. What happens if in five or ten years the cheap Chinese labor pool unionizes and strikes for higher wages?
Then the ChiComs will crack down and imprison the leaders (or kill them) since the Communist Party will not brook any form of political organization that it doesn't wholly own and operate. And if they want more money than the work is worth, I'm sure some Cambodians will take up the slack, which'd be better than sex slavery at any rate. Better fucked in the wallet than in the 12-year-old vagina by sweaty German tourists, don't you think?
It's only slavery if they can't quit and walk.
Granted, given China's history and politics, that wouldn't be too hard to imagine.
But there's nothing that I've read that suggests that Apple (or any other western employer) can coerce the government at any level into indenturing Chinese citizens to their foreign 'masters'. Considering their history, one would find that possibility quite unlikely.
Methinks everyone in the US could use a mandatory 2-year refresher in world history. As long as it isn't taught exclusively by Zinn and his fellow-travelling comrades.
If you don't like the wages, don't work for the company. Enough people not working for the company, they have to raise wages. That's how it works. Your labor is worth what someone will pay you for it, or what you can create and sell with it. TANSTAAFL.
And if Apple (or some other corp) weren't there, what would they do? Farm?? Like you can make any money doing that with western subsidies glutting agriculture markets.
Hey, there's always the sex trade...
... howsabout getting devices of the _current_ generation to work properly? So folks can, I don't know, use video switching receivers and not have to worry about HDMI version compatibility?
Then again, "This one works, really, we mean it this time!" as an ad slogan only seems to work for Microsoft...
... there's no time to loose!
(or is that "there's No-Time Toulouse!")
If you still have the art files for Transport Tycoon, check out openttd.org. Very fun, with rules expansions, patches, bugfixes, and (yes) cheats.
;)
Many people think it's more fun than Sawyer's own followup Locomotion. And you can't beat the price or the platform availability (Win32, Linux, OS X, MorphOS)..
(just wish there were a Symbian or Palm version
Sorry folks, but that is the definition of a police state. The fact that it doesn't happen as often as it does in other police states doesn't change a damn thing.
Yes it does. We only do it to terrorists.
And hopefully soon, we'll do it to pinkos too.
I am an owner of an ipod and hate the interface
Doesn't say much about the competition then..
(Or is it just to get chicks?)
3. If this made general Internet access suck it could (here's to hoping) force deregulation of transmission lines.
Let's hope not.
Even without going full-electric (and even if it solved the 'refueling' problem, it'd need to be able to go at least 350mi between charges to be useful to single-car households) I'd think a fully-capacitorized battery system would make regenerative braking much more efficient, since current hybrid designs can't get full regenerative efficiency because of how much juice you can shove back into the batteries in the given time.. If these capacitors could keep up with a full-stomp brake from 60mph that would be a huge improvement.. It'd lengthen the life of pads and rotors too..
So maybe the rust belt should be fighting for these developments, but they can't overcome 1 issue - companies want to be close to their datacenter. It goes against the security mission, the cost justification, and just about everything else; but these always get built right next to corporate HQ or in some metropolitan area. Doh!
Nope, the rust belt is fscked because of legacy tax and political structures geared around dying heavy industries. If MI had the same tax, political and work structures as, say, Nevada, they might be able to do it.
The best location for colocation? Hmm.. Cross-reference power costs, distance to backbone peering, and corporate friendliness rankings... Maybe Wyoming, Tennessee, South Dakota?